STACKERS · OUTSIDE PHOTOSHOP
NightScape Stacker vs. Siril
Siril is free, powerful, and complete enough that some photographers never leave it. That’s the headline — and also, quietly, the whole difference between us.
What Siril does well
A great deal. Siril is a free, serious astro-processing application: calibration, registration, stacking, stretching, color calibration, and a scripting system that can automate an entire pipeline — it can even drive StarNet for star removal. It runs everywhere, it’s actively developed, and the people who invest in it get real results. Siril isn’t a stacker with extras; it’s a complete processing world of its own.
And here’s the thing: if you’re happy living in that world, keep living there. We’re not going to talk you out of a free tool you’ve already mastered.
The difference: it is another world
That completeness is the cost. Siril has its own interface, its own vocabulary, its own scripting language, its own way of thinking about an image — a real learning curve before your first good result. And if Photoshop is where your images actually get finished, everything Siril produces still ends in a handoff: export, re-import, and a color-management seam between two applications, every single image.
NightScape Lab is two panels inside Photoshop, the application you already master. The Stacker panel integrates your lights and darks in the background; the master opens as a clean, tagged 16-bit linear ProPhoto document; the Lab panel’s tools — white balance, light pollution, stars, defringe — run in order, right next to your Layers. Nothing new to learn except the panels themselves.
Two worlds, one screenshot each
Side-by-side screen captures: (left) a real Siril session mid-pipeline — its workspace, console, and script steps visible; (right) Photoshop with both panels docked and the linear master open. Not a mockery — Siril’s shot should look genuinely capable. The caption carries the point: one of these is your editor.
Who should choose which
Choose Siril if you want a free, deep, scriptable processing environment and you’re willing to make it home — or it already is home. It rewards the investment, and it costs nothing to find out.
Choose NightScape Lab if Photoshop is home and you’d rather deepen that mastery than start a second one. Stack and finish in two panels, get the un-degraded linear master as a document, develop it with the skills you already have. $99, once.
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